Science lets us down once again

My Doctor is everything that you expect from a Doctor, she is careful, caring and spends an enormous amount of time with each patient, highly annoying if you’re waiting to see her.

 But as most Doctors her usual line of intervention with any physical ailment is stating as she hands you the latest medication “take one of these a day and if you’re not better in 15 days come back and see me”. All this without even blushing, which leads me to reflect on what we know about illness and how we know it.

My father is recently suffering from a neurological disorder that sends him into small seizures when ever he gets excited by anything. He has had several scans and all types of tests which show no structural or functional alterations in his central nervous system. He does also have small strokes, but these seem to be apart and do not explain why he will spontaneously launch into an involuntary shaking fit.

Now science, and specifically medicine needs order to maintain its objectivity and a scientific quantitative approach is not providing answers to my fathers’ very subjective and qualitative disorder. Medicine is failing to give importance to the psychosocial relationship, that is the functional relationship my father has with his environment. After all living is simply the contact between ourselves and the outside world and how we make sense of that.

But while he struggles to relocate the way he experiences his life, science blunders blindly on repeating the same test over and over again in a futile attempt at self justification (I’m talking here on a more theoretical level and by no means disrespecting the wonderful work of the Doctors that actually attend to my father)

Right now my father is making meaning out of his experience and not all is helpful I fear, because to think is to think about something and as Gestalt therapists would say his “illness” has become a new figure in his attention spotlight.

My father also comes from a generation that traditionally gives great respect to the natural sciences and so of course this inability to provide him with an answer is even more confusing for him. I repeat my upmost respect for the professionals who have treated him, but would it be too much to ask that after recognising the fact that science is failing to give an answer, that he receives the attention of a psychotherapist. Not just a brief intervention of 6 sessions recommended by the NHS, but with someone who is not emotionally involved and with whom he could build a meaningful relation.